Slightly customizing a bootable live USB?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Mon, 13 Sep 2021 19:03:25 +0100, Adam Funk wrote:
>Is there any easy way to add a couple of Ubuntu packages to a bootable
>"live" USB stick (so they persist when it's booted on another
>machine), either before or after copying the image to the stick?

Hi,

I'm doing this with Xubuntu 20.04 using
https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html , actually I installed it by my
Arch Linux install https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ventoy-bin/ .

$ cat ventoy.json 
{
    "persistence": [
        {
            "image": "/xubuntu-20.04.1-desktop-amd64.iso",
            "backend": "/xubuntu-20.04.1-desktop-pers1.dat"
        }
    ]
}

You can use it more or less like a regular *buntu install. I guess
there's just no way to boot into an updated kernel. You should always
explicitly boot the live media manually, don't let it automatically
boot, if you would do so, you would lose all your desktop settings, but
installed packages will be still available, even when automatically
booting the ISO.

Regards,
Ralf